Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Bets on a Conjecture Physicists Cannot Yet Disprove

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe premieres Thursday, July 23, at 9:00 PM ET exclusively on HBO Max — and the theoretical physics underpinning its central premise is, as of March 2026, more empirically grounded than it was last year. The show's device — a machine built by Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter that comic book store owner Stuart Bloom accidentally breaks, triggering what HBO Max's logline calls a "multiverse Armageddon" — maps, in its most scientifically coherent reading, onto two genuine open problems in theoretical physics. The second of those problems, the ER = EPR conjecture proposed by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind in 2013, survived its first quantitative empirical test when Irfan Javed and Edward Wilson-Ewing published a study in Physical Review Letters in March 2026 constraining — but not refuting — the conjecture. The show's wormhole transit sequences are fictional. The physics they reach toward is not. The Big Bang Theory franchise's fourth television series stars Kevin Sussman as Stuart Bloom, a character the original series ran for twelve seasons as its most reliably unfortunate supporting player. He is joined by Lauren Lapkus as Denise, Brian Posehn as geologist Bert Kibbler, and John Ross Bowie as quantum…